The MIT License

What is MIT License?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) License is one of the widely used License(s) in the open source field. Can this License agreement protect developers from lawsuits? Here is the MIT license agreement and my final thoughts below.

MIT License

MIT License

Copyright

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Intresting things about the MIT License

What I have found interesting about this license while reading Kyle E. Mitchell post is that developer(s) are not responsible in maintaining their software after the user is agreeing to this license. If you see this license and agree to it, then keep in mind that if any bugs or issues come up in the softwares lifespan, the ones who wrote this software are not responsible to fix it because the software provided “as is”.

Its important to understand every detail in this agreement and not to skim through it because, it might effect your business in the worst case.

Furthermore, another interesting factor is that you must follow 3 conditions in order to distribute the software. Not following these condition can open a law suit against you.

Conditions:

Notice condition

Warranty Disclaimer

Limitation of Liability

The first condition applies when you want to distribute this particular software, you must include the MIT License agreement. The second condition, which is the Warranty Disclaimer means that the user is agreeing to receive this software “as is”. The last condition is the Limitation of Liability, which means that the copyright holders or authors cannot be liable for any claim damages.

Most of the open-source softwares include the MIT License, which I think is beneficial for developers. Therefore these are the main things that I found interesting about the MIT License.